War, Agriculture, and Food

Rural Europe from the 1930s to the 1950s

Paul Brassley, Yves Segers, Leen Van Molle, Paul Brassley, Yves Segers, Leen Van Molle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136327230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Between the 1930s and the 1950s rural life in Europe underwent profound changes, partly as a result of the Second World War, and partly as a result of changes which had been in progress over many years. This book examines a range of European countries, from Scandinavia to Spain and Ireland to Hungary, during this crucial period, and identifies the common pressures to which they all responded and the features that were unique to individual countries. In particular, it examines the processes of agricultural development over western Europe as a whole, the impact of the war on international trading patterns, the relationships between states and farmers, and the changing identities of rural populations. It presents a bold attempt to write rural history on a European scale, and will be of interest not only to historians and historical geographers, but also to those interested in the historical background to the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union, to which the changes discussed here provided a dramatic prologue.

1 Introduction

Leen Van Molle, Yves Segerss and Paul Brassley

In the middle of the sixteenth century Pieter Breugel the Elder painted The Fall of Icarus; there, in the foreground, is a farmer who continues to plough as if nothing has happened. This is indeed a classical image of farming, a perennial activity apparently insensitive to the vicissitudes of fortune. The same image reappears in the middle of the 1930s in the famous ‘Ballad of the Farmer’.¹ It recalls how the farmer carries on ploughing, despite the fall of Troy, the Crucifixion on Golgotha, Napoleon’s banishment to St. Helena, and despite the arson attack—probably referring to the First World War— that reduced his farm to ashes. ‘Yet the farmer ploughed on’—providing the illusion of continuity. This is precisely what this book wants to question: to what extent did the Second World War challenge and change the outlook and nature of European post-war farming and countryside? Did the war produce or simply accelerate change in this pivotal period?

BELGIUM AS AN EXAMPLE

Belgium appears to be a relevant example to start the search for an answer: a small country with a mixed economy (agriculture, but from the early nineteenth century onwards a quickly expanding industry and tertiary sector), and well-known internationally as ‘Poor Little Belgium’ on account of what she suffered during the First World War. During the economic crisis of the 1930s the country hoped—in vain, because the Ouchy Convention of 1932 never came into operation—for a customs union in order to safeguard a free market for its agriculture and industry. That was precisely what the Benelux Treaty, signed in London in September 1944 between Belgium, the Netherlands, and the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg, aimed at. A decade later the same three countries became pivotal activists of the construction of the European Economic Community, now the European Union with the Belgian capital Brussels hosting its principal institutions, from which also the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is steered. The question we are looking at is: what occurred in Belgium, and in the other countries that will be considered further in this book, in and around the Second World War that might help to produce a better understanding of the recent history of the agriculture and countryside of Europe?

On 10 May 1940, Belgium was once again invaded by German troops. The country was not much better prepared for the ensuing war than it had been for the preceding one. For too long, it had continued to trust in its status of neutrality and failed to take account of the prospect of a years-long regime of occupation. In 1939, 75 per cent (in monetary terms) of Belgian food requirements were met by domestic production, though only 50 per cent in terms of calorific intake. Three quarters of the necessary bread grains had to be imported, as well as half of the vegetables and animal fats, half of the fish, and a third of the fruit. It is true that the country produced sufficient meat, but that was at the cost of importing two million tonnes of cattle-feed. During 1939, with the reality of war looming, the Belgian government began hastily to act, ordering stockpiling; drawing up cultivation plans to drive up the production of grain, potatoes, and sugar beet; and making a start with the distribution of ration cards. It was all to little avail.²

From August 1940 to the end of August 1944, agriculture and the food supply in Belgium were governed by a rigid, state-administered institution—the National Agriculture and Food Corporation (Corporation Nationale d’Agriculture et d’Alimentation)—that dictated production, processing, and stock formation; controlled wholesale and retail trade; determined maximum prices; and rationed consumption.³ Agriculture itself was hit by the ravages of war, requisitioning, and the mandatory provision of supplies to the occupier, as well as a lack of investment and of inputs such as good seed, fertilisers, and cattle-feed. Poultry and pig stocks were decimated, but cattle and horse numbers declined only by about 15 to 20 per cent. The population groaned under the yoke of all too scant food rations—particularly in 1943, when the daily food ration fell to 1,300 calories (2,300–2,500 calories are commonly accepted as a minimum) and prices soared in the flourishing black market. In Belgium, as in other countries caught up in the war, the unequal access to additional food led to parallel, charitable food circuits, though also to fraudulent practices that in turn generated social tensions, more particularly between town and country, and between the various groups in the food chain (producers, dealers, and consumers), tensions which in some cases continued to reverberate long after the war.⁴

All in all, however, Belgium emerged from the Second World War less battered than from the First. Historia magistra vitae? The official supply circuit functioned better than it had between 1914 and 1918 and there was relatively less hunger, which can be counted an achievement for a country whose trade balance for food during the inter-war years had been constantly negative. For the Belgian agricultural sector, the 1939–1945 war acted as an agent of change at least in one respect, namely, in that the occupier made it obligatory for milk to be pasteurized, which led to an initial reorganization in the Belgian dairy sector and formed the basis for the wave of concentration and modernization during the 1950s. Post-war recovery, too, progressed better. Shortly after the German withdrawal, the hated, dirigiste bureaucracy that had organized agricultural production and food supply was abolished, a move that was followed in October 1944 by a currency reform and in October 1945 by the imposition of additional taxes, which together resulted in a drastic creaming-off of war profits. By the end of 1948, the free market had been virtually restored.⁵

What were the marks left by the war and what were their consequences for agriculture and the countryside? It is worthwhile to detail the perception of contemporaries. In September 1945, barely ten months after the liberation of the Belgian territory, an ambitious National Congress for Agricultural Renewal (Congrès National de la Rénovation Agricole) took place in Brussels under the auspices of the semi-official National Committee for the Betterment of the Countryside (Commission Nationale d’Embellissement de la Vie Rurale), which had been campaigning since 1905 for the modernization of the countryside. The congress report is 563 pages long and contains 129 papers from politicians, senior civil servants, leaders of farming organizations, university professors, instructors at agricultural colleges and agricultural housekeeping schools, and so on, divided among six sections: agricultural techniques, agricultural economy, social affairs, the improvement of rural life, spirituality and morality, and education in the countryside.

What stands out in the report? In the first place is the fact that the congress was forward-looking and hammered away at modernization. Thanks to war profits, one of the congress papers hinted, farmers had already been able to invest in their farmhouse, electricity, water supply, telephone, and radio.⁶ Key words in the mouths of numerous speakers were progress, productivity, intensification, amelioration, innovation, rationalization, specialization, and modernization. It was only in respect of morality that a few preferred a backward-looking approach, arguing for moral re-education and the realigning of consciences, after a war replete with horror, deceit, betrayal, revenge, and decadence.⁷ The second important feature was that the speakers placed responsibility for the future of agriculture and the countryside chiefly in the hands of the politicians, of state institutions (existing or yet to be established), and notably of science. The trail was to be blazed by research, including agricultural-economic and market research, which in Belgium—certainly in comparison to the situation in the United States—were still in its infancy.⁸ In the midst of the scarcity that still prevailed in September 1945, those attending the congress warned pointedly of the return of competition both in Belgium and on the international market. They were concerned about Belgium’s agricultural position because ‘this last war (…) has thrown up a fact that demands all our attention: (…) (that) Belgium has become a veritable province of the world and of the great powers’ (la dernière guerre … a mis en évidence un fait qui doit retenir notre grande attention: … (que) la Belgique est devenu une véritable province du monde et des grandes puissances).⁹ In order to ensure the competitiveness of Belgian agriculture, they proposed action at two levels: at the farm level, increasing output (an understandable but misplaced reaction in a surplus market with downward pressure on prices) and quality improvement; at the political level, the protection of the domestic market (through import duties, for example) and international, even worldwide, consultation and agreements.¹⁰ In matters of the social and moral (re-)education of the farming population no central role was envisaged for the state and politics at the congress; the task of (Catholic) education was reserved for the family, and especially mothers. In other words, there was a harking back to the traditional dichotomy between the hard, male world of warfare, politics, the marketplace, and science and the soft, female world of raising children and moral education.

The congress participants were more or less blind to a process that was gathering pace in densely populated and urbanized Belgium, and increasingly elsewhere in Europe, a process that was having a powerful impact on the position of agriculture in the economy and society as a whole: namely, progressive ‘desagrarianization’, ‘defarmerization’, and ‘deruralization’.¹¹ The speakers nevertheless launched a post-war agricultural and rural project in which farmers and arable land and pastureland stood central, as if these played and would continue to play a dominant role in the country. The tension between tradition and modernity that they perceived was one merely of external appearance, of façade in both the literal and figurative sense, rather than of content: the modern farm building was not to disturb the ‘pastoral’ character of the countryside.

Finally, it is interesting to note that the congress was virtually silent about the war. Few lectures made any mention of the hostilities and their consequences. Was this because the war was too fresh and too painful a memory? Or because of the obviousness of the rapid recovery from it, and of ‘back to business’ being the name of the game? The speakers constantly referred back to the pre-war situation, speaking in terms of ‘pre’ and ‘post’, as if the war itself had been an annoying interlude that of itself had had no impact on later developments. Their discourse restored continuity, as it were; indeed, their desire was for nothing else.

WAR AND RURAL CHANGE: TIME, SPACE, AND THEMES

That discourse, in Brussels in September 1945, presents us with the question of whether, in respect of both Belgium and the rest of Europe, the longing for continuity in agricultural and rural development can withstand the probing of historical research. This question may be studied from different angles, that is, from a chronological, a spatial, and a thematic perspective.

The Chronological Perspective

In terms of time, scholarly literature about agriculture and the countryside in and around the Second World War can, by and large, be divided into three groups. First are the writers who raise few problems about the function of the Second World War as a phase in the historical process. Separate publications deal with the inter-war period, the war years themselves, and the post-war period. Agriculture and the countryside of the 1920s and 1930s are accorded a particular character in terms of progress or decline, conservatism, innovation, and so on.¹² The war itself has its own literature that gives it separate status and emphasizes the disruption of normal life, destruction, state involvement in agriculture and distribution, and hunger.¹³ In turn, the post-war period has generated writing on rising output and productivity since the 1950s and European market integration.¹⁴ The division into three periods appears to have its own logic, but the question arises of whether it does not too easily adopt the compelling chronology of political history. What it certainly does is to create and reinforce the idea of rupture and discontinuity that, as this book sets out to investigate further, is not so obvious from a spatial and thematic perspective.

Secondly, there is also agricultural historical research that virtually passes over the Second World War as if it was no more than a brief interlude, not a breaking-point, which thereby creates the impression of continuity.¹⁵ Recently, certain scholars have also explicitly advanced the continuity thesis, giving little weight to the world wars over the long run in respect of the globalization of the food supply, the development of agricultural policy, and social attitudes in rural areas.¹⁶

Thirdly, and perhaps most significantly, there are the writers who, in terms of agriculture, explicitly link the world wars with what went before and what came after, and even ascribe a central role to those wars in the processes of change.¹⁷ However, it is not easy to grasp exactly what role they played and how it worked in practice. Authors, as Marwick once noted, often fall back on metaphors. ‘War’, as William Alexander Robson from the London School of Economics wrote in 1950, ‘is the midwife of change. But the changes war brings to birth are those whose seeds have long been germinating in the womb of time’.¹⁸ A war can serve to inspire, transform, catalyze, or accelerate. Marwick himself linked the world wars to social change, thereby bringing down a wave of criticism on his head; others link the state-run war economy of 1940–1945 to the later agricultural revolution.¹⁹ This book seeks to bring the question of continuity versus discontinuity into sharper focus by consciously opting for a broad and comparative approach.

The Spatial Perspective

The chapters in this book reflect the diverse picture within wider Europe. They cover Northern, Eastern, Southern, and Western Europe, taking in not only belligerent and occupied countries, but neutrals as well—specifically: Great Britain, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, and Hungary.

Developments during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s differed from country to country, and possibly, too, from region to region. There were, for example, different starting-points after the First World War. The impact of that conflict on the agricultural economy, the countryside, and soci...